You may like or dislike MS Teams, the newest tool in Office 365, for a lot of reasons. This post ist about my very personal views. I want to put a light on whats happening furthermore of the technical functions and what benefits I see in using MS teams:

1. Teams develops in an incredible speed, we constantly notice, that new features are announced and launched, the uservoice Community is truly engaged. MS Teams is thereby a positive rolemodel for change. Our world has probably never in its history changed so rapidly (and won’t do that as slow as today. The approach of self-service puts user in the position to be self-sufficient actors in their teams. They can participate of organisational evolution, experience shift and become real creators. #embracechange isn’t just a buzzword, but a description of a movement for confirmation and confidence!
2. Simplifying Teamwork by meeting challenges is the big surpose of MS Teams:

• Keeping everyone in the loop
• Making content easy to access to
• Creating balance between deep work and shallow work

Transparency in persistent teamchat, document storage in SharePoint, clear-structured task-management in planner and (in near future) the possibility to record calls and make their content searchable guarantees that knowledge is saved sustainably.

Old working methods via mail contributed to poor information, tasks being not completed at all or  multiple times, knowledge had to be acquired again and again.

MS Teams supports an ad-hoc workstyle, though users can work deepened and focused on their subject, since they set their status on occupied or don’t disturb or to mute chats for turning off distractions.

3. MS Teams lets me work  in the right context due to ist channels, (which represent folders in the Teamsite. Information and tasks are assigned to processes or business transactions by default, which increases the retrieval of documents, but also supports me to focus on what I’m doing now.

4. MS Teams isn’t a closed system, but lets me see and manage information from other ecosystems by using connectors. The list of connectors grows and grows. Teams is thereby a very flexible hub, nice-looking frontend for my personal workplace.

5. Each team is powered by an Office 365 Group. Everytime, a new team is created, AD creates a group identity, so that everyone in Teams has access to the right content. This simplifies work in our IT department, who know may concentrate on how to bring value to users on eye level.

6. The heart of MS Teams is the persistent teamchat, which – this is at least the generally accepted theory – is truely adopted only by Generation Y or millenials. In my experince MS Teams in conjunction with flow is so flexible, that all generations may coexist peacefully and that the so-called Babyboomers appreciate transparency, direct contact to their co-workers and intuitive usability more than insisting on a “we have always done it like this”-position

7. MS Teams supports by its accessability via browser, in apps on mobile devices and via external guest access genuine collaboration: white-collar and blue-collar-worker, mobile-worker and homeoffice-worker, external consultants and so on. MS Teams ist thereby booster of commuinity ideals, even if members of the team don’t see each other on a daily basis.

8. Giphys, stickers, emojis and a chat, which doesn’t require formal adressing – and nevertheless still contains work-related information: This allows to communicate more emotionally. Our talks will be richer and more human, the density of information will be higher and there will be more sustainable interaction.

9. Teams  supports through ist architecture the idea of a network. Working in crossfunctional teams instead of hierarchic silos will increase productivity.

10. Social media features like liking and commenting facilitate users to share their ideas and provide valuable feedback. Active involvement is key!